People's biggest misconception about their genes, Wojcicki said,
is that we have a lot of information about them and what they all
do.

"We're just scratching the surface of our understanding," she
told Tyson. "The job I feel like I have to my consumers is
conveying the fact that we really don't know a lot yet."

Geneticists know a lot about certain genes, Wojcicki continued,
citing how mutations in
the CFTR gene can lead to cystic fibrosis, and how BRCA
mutations can lead to breast and ovarian cancers.

Angelina Jolie made the BRCA mutations famous, since she
found out she had one — plus a strong family history of cancer —
and decided to get a double mastectomy, then have her ovaries and
fallopian tubes removed, in order to decrease her cancer risk.

Only about
1% of women carry a BRCA mutation in the general population,
though, so the finding is not actually relevant to most women.
(It is one of the mutations you can find if you send 23andMe your
DNA to test.)

Many other genes, however, still have many, many more secrets to
unlock.

Wojcicki said it could be many years before we turn our raw
knowledge about the human genome into treatments for diseases
that afflict us.

"It has been decades since we discovered things like the cystic
fibrosis mutation and there’s now one drug out there
today that's doing a good job treating it," she told Tyson.
"But just because you know the gene and potentially how that
manifests into a disease doesn't mean that we're actually going
to treat it well or we're going to successfully have a therapy
for it."